All The Fintech - 2.6.18 - Hodl on to your hats everyone

Happy Tuesday everyone and congrats to the Iggles for winning their first Superb Owl. Meanwhile, for any following the market (whether that be the stock or crypto), it’s been a pretty rough start to the week.

One interesting side effect of crypto that I’ve observed is new people that historically have not been curious about financial services, rapidly getting up to speed and interested. Everyday, I talk to more and more people are that want to learn about the nuts and bolts finance, whether it’s retail investors trying to understand the what hodl means, to new day-traders learning about candlesticks and cloud trading, to developers building on top of (or replacing) legacy financial infrastructure. There’s a huge influx of talent across the world that are focusing their attention on financial services and learning how broken the experience has been.

In some ways, this is the primary reason why I’m overall bullish on crypto. Some of the smartest people I know are spending 100% of their time on a variety of projects on the space and if I were an investor, I’m willing to bet that there are going to be a ton of interesting solutions developed. I think it’s going to be a huge positive for the future of financial services, crash or no crash :).

Just a week after we reported that Fair was acquiring the leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing from Uber, the flexible car-ownership startup is making two more moves. Today, the company confirmed that it has raised another round of funding led by next47, the VC firm backed by Siemens; and it has made another acquisition, of Los Angeles-based Skurt, a service that lets you rent a car, and then delivers that vehicle to you.

Flexible ownership of cars is an interesting twist on car ownership and auto-lending. I expect to see a lot more activity from newer companies in this space as traditional FI’s continue to reduce exposure to the subprime auto lending market.

Mick Mulvaney, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has pulled back from a full-scale probe of how Equifax Inc failed to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is pulling back on protecting consumers is how I read this one.

He had invested in bitcoin almost two years earlier, so now Jacob Melin had a new house, a new truck, a new consulting business and a line of people coming into his office, trying to become wealthy as quickly as he had.

I think people interested in financial services is net positive, but also DYOR.

Some of the world’s largest banks announced on Friday that customers are now prohibited from buying cryptocurrencies with credit cards, citing market volatility.

I saw a lot of hot takes on this across Twitter, but I actually agree that this was probably the right move from the banks from a risk management perspective. Crypto is super volatile and if individuals are buying it on credit and then seeing the market crash, could create meaningful default risk across a credit portfolio.

Alibaba has added an additional angle to the announcement of its latest financial report today with news that it is taking a 33 percent stake in Ant Financial, its fintech affiliate that operates Alipay and other financial services.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what this means. Alibaba and it’s subsidiaries seem unnecessarily complex to me, but Ant Financial is supposedly one of the largest private fintech companies at the world at this point.

Some health-care companies have complained to JPMorgan Chase & Co. about the bank’s new health-care partnership with Amazon.com Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc., worried that it could cut into their business…Mr. Dimon began making calls from his office atop the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters, these people said. In those conversations, Mr. Dimon told clients the planned health-care initiative is for JPMorgan, Amazon and Berkshire employees only.

Some more hints around what the joint health-care venture looks like. Apparently looks like “a group purchasing organization, a type of setup used by hospitals to buy supplies, so the companies can get better deals for their employees.”